anysia | Did Bush and his adminstration need a dictionary, and look up the word "Terrorise"

Olbermans Special Comment on GOP Fearmongering

And lastly, tonight, a Special Comment on the advertising of terrorism.

The commercial, you have already seen, it is a distillation ofeverything this administration and the party in power have tried to dothese last five years and six weeks.

It is from the Republican National Committee, it shows images ofOsama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri. It offers quotes from them, allas a clock ticks ominously in the background. It concludes with whatZawahiri may or may not have said to a Pakistani journalist as long agoas 2001, his dubious claim that he had purchased suitcase bombs. Thequotation is followed by sheer coincidence, no doubt, by an image of amassive explosion. "These are the stakes" appears on the screen,quoting exactly from Lyndon Johnson's infamous nuclear scare commercialfrom 1964, "Vote November 7^th".

There is a cheap Texas Chainsaw Massacre quality to the whole thing.It also serves to immediately call to mind the occasions when PresidentBush dismissed Osama bin Laden as somebody he didn't think about,except, obviously, when elections were near. Frankly, a lot of peopleseeing that commercial for the first time have laughed out loud, butnot everyone. And therein lies the true threat to this country.

The dictionary definition of the word ‘terrorize' is simple and notopen to misinterpretation: "To fill or overpower with terror; terrify;coerce by intimidation or fear." Note please that the words ‘violence'and ‘death' are missing from that definition. For the key to terrorismis not the act-but the fear of the act. That is why binLaden and his deputies and his imitators are forever putting togethervideotape statements and releasing virtual infomercials with direthreats and heart-stopping warnings.

But why is the Republican Party imitating them? Bin Laden puts outwhat amounts to a commercial of fear; the Republicans put out what isunmistakable as a commercial of fear.

The Republicans are paying to have the messages of bin Laden and theothers broadcast into your home! Only the Republicans have a biggerbankroll.

When last week, the CNN network ran video of an insurgent in Iraqevidently stalking and killing an American soldier, Chairman of theHouse Armed Services Committee Mr. Hunter, Republican of California,branded that channel quote "the publicist for an enemy propagandafilm," and added that CNN used it to sell commercials. AnotherCalifornia Republican, Representative Brian Bilbray, called the videoquote "nothing short of a terrorist snuff film."

If so, Mr. Bilbray, then what in the hell is your party's newadvertisement? And Mr. Hunter? CNN using the film to sell commercials? Commercials? You have adopted bin Laden and Zawahiri as spokesmen forthe Republican National Committee.

‘To fill or overpower with terror; terrify. To coerce by intimidation or fear'

By this definition, the people who put these videos together: first,the terrorists and then, the administration, whose shared goal is toscare you into panicking instead of thinking, they are the onesterrorizing you.

By this definition, the leading terrorist group in this world rightnow is al Qaeda, but the leading terrorist group in this country rightnow is the Republican Party.

Eleven presidents ago, the chief executive reassured us that ‘wehave nothing to fear, but fear itself.' His distant successor haswasted his administration, insisting there is nothing we can have butfear itself.

The Vice President, as recently as this month, was caughtcampaigning again with the phrase "mass death in the United States". Four years ago, it was the now Secretary of State, Dr. Rice,rationalizing Iraq with quote, "we don't want to be…the smoking gun tobe the mushroom cloud." Days later, Mr. Bush himself told an audiencethat quote "we cannot wait the final proof, the smoking gun, that couldcome in the form of a mushroom cloud."

And now we have this cheesy commercial, complete with images of afaked mushroom cloud and implications of mass death in America.

This administration has derived benefit and power from terrorizingthe very people it claims to be protecting from terror. It may be theoldest trick in the political book: scare people into believing theyare in danger and only you can save them. Lyndon Johnson used it tobury Barry Goldwater. Joe McCarthy leaped from obscurity on its back. And now the legacy has come to President George W. Bush.

Of course, the gruel of fear is getting thinner and thinner, is itnot, Mr. President? And thus, more and more of it needs to be made outof less and less actual terror. After last week's embarrassinginternet hoax about dirty bombs in footballs stadiums, the one yourDepartment of Homeland Security immediately disseminated to the public,a self-described former CIA operative named Wayne Simmons cited thefiasco as quote "The, and I mean, the perfect example of thePresident's Military Commissions Act of 2006 and the NSA TerroristEavesdropping Program-how vital they are."

Frank Gaffney, once a respected Assistant Secretary of Defense andnow the president of something called The Center for Security Policyadded "one of the things that I hope Americans take away from this isnot only that they're gunning for us. Not just in a place like Iraq,but truly worldwide."

Of course, the "they" to which Mr. Gaffney referred, turned out tobe a lone 20-year-old grocery bagger from Wisconsin named Jake. A kidtrying to one-up some loser in an internet game of ‘chicken.' Histhreat referenced seven football stadiums, at which dirty bombs were tobe exploded yesterday. It began with the one in New York City, eventhough there isn't one in New York City and though the attacks weresupposed to be simultaneous, four of the games were scheduled to startat 1:00 pm Eastern time and the others at 4:00 pm Eastern time. Moreover, the kid said that he had posted the identical message onforty websites since September. We caught him in merely about sixweeks, even though the only way he could be less subtle, less stealthyand less of a threat was if he bought an advertisement on the Superbowltelecast.

Mr. Bush, this is the what–100^th plot your people haverevealed that turned out to be some nonsensical misunderstanding or thefabrications of somebody hoping to talk his way off a waterboard inEastern Europe? If, Mr. President, this is the kind of crack work yournew ad implies that only you, and not the Democrats, can do, you, sir,need to pull over and ask for directions. The real question, ofcourse, Mr. Bush, is why did your Department of Homeland Security evenrelease that information in the first place? It was never a seriousthreat. Even the first news accounts quoted a Homeland spokesman asadmitting strong skepticism. The kind of strong skepticism which mostgovernment agencies address before telling the public, not afterwards.

So that leaves two options, Mr. President: the first option, you andyour Department of Homeland Security don't have the slightest idea whatyou're doing here. Thus, contrary to your flip-flopping between saying,"we're safe" and saying, "but we're not safe enough", and contrary tothe Vice President's swaggering pronouncements about the lack ofanother attack since 9/11, the last five years HAS been just anaccident.

Or there's the second option: your political operatives leaked thisnonsense for the same reason your political operatives put out thatcommercial. To scare the gullible.

Obviously, the correct answer, Mr. Bush, is: all of the above.

There are some of us who could forgive you, for trying to run yourcandidates on the coattails of the Grim Reaper, for reducing yourparty's existence to "Death and the Tax Us." It's cynical andbarbaric, but after all, it may be merely the extension of the gutterpolitics to which you have subscribed since you sidled over frombaseball and the business world of other people's money.

But to forgive you for terrorizing us, we would have to believe thatyou somehow competent in keeping others from terrorizing us. Yet lastweek, construction workers repairing a subway line in New York Citywere cleaning out an abandoned manhole on the edge of the WTC site,when they stumbled on the horrific and impossible: human remains from9/11. Bones and fragments, eighty of them. Some as much as a footlong. The victims had been lying literally in the gutter for fiveyears and five weeks. The families and friends of each of the 2,749dead, who had been grimly told in May 2002, that there were no moreremains to be found, were struck anew as if the terrorism of that dayhad just happened all over again.

And over this weekend, they have found still more remains. And nowthis week will be spent looking in places that should have already beenlooked at a thousand times, five years ago.

For all the victims in New York, Mr. Bush, the living and the dead,it is a touch of 9/11 all over again. And the mayor of this city, whocalled off this search four and a half years ago is a Republican. Thegovernor, with whom he conferred, is a Republican. The House ofRepresentatives, Republican. The Senate, Republican. The President,Republican. And yet you can claim that you and you alone can protectus from terrorism?

You can't even recover our dead from the battlefield. Thebattlefield in an American city. When we've given you five years andunlimited funds to do so.

While citing a Military Commissions Act so monstrous that it has nowbeen criticized by even the John Birch Society, you told us, Mr. Bush,quote, "there is nothing we can do to bring back the men and women loston September 11^th, 2001, yet we'll always honor their memoryand we will never forget the way they were taken from us." Except ofcourse, for the ones that have been lying under a manhole cover forfive years.

Setting aside the fact that your government has done nothing elsefor those five years but pat itself on the back about terror, whilewaging pointless war on the wrong enemy in Iraq and waging war on thecherished freedoms in America, just on this subject ofcounter-terrorism, sir, yours is the least competent government in timeof crisis in this country's history.

These are the stakes indeed, Mr. President. You do not know whatyou are doing. And the commercial, the one about which Zawahiri mightsay, "hey, pretty good, we love your choice of font style," all thatfurther needs to be said about that is to add three words toShakespeare. Mr. President, you and that advertisement of terror arefull of sound and fury, signifying–and competent at–nothing.